You want know what I'm saying? I'm saying you're an argumentative git who can come up with something deeper and more relevant to say than that, but you didn't. What exactly do you think 'weird experiment' refers to here?

To be fair, 90 days was not, in fact, the estimated lifetime of the mission. It was the design specification of the mission. That is, each of the subsystems was designed with the specification "design a system that will operate for a minimum of 90 (Martian) days, even under worst-case conditions."

Think of it as a 90-day warranty-- after 90 days, it wasn't expected to be dead, it was just out of warranty.

(and note that since the engineering specification was validated by testing the subsystems to either three times design life, or testing to design life under three-sigma worst-case conditions, it would have been very difficult to design for 4000 days...)

Yes indeed. Opportunity has to stand as one of NASA's greatest post-Apollo accomplishments.

I agree completely. And why does it even need to be QWERTY??

Graffiti, which was suggested by the submitter, doesn't satisfy the QWERTY condition. And for good reasons, all the design constraints that were there when the QWERTY keyboard was created, are no longer there when changing to that much smaller form factor.

How does that work out for them?

"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing." — Alan Perlis

Mono works fine as long as you have at least one person on your team writing in Mono, not Visual Studio. That way you won't accidentally build on incompatibilities.

I don't think you understood the GPs point. He is talking about choosing a language to learn, not choosing a language for a particular task. Certainly, the language you choose for a task is important.

The reality is (and the GPs point) learning a new language shouldn't take you very much time. If you have to ask whether a language is worth learning, the answer is 'YES' because at that point you need more experience learning languages.

Actually the NSA's charter is secret, so you have no idea what it precludes them from doing.

No, spying has not saved more lives than it's cost. Spying is what caused countless Russians to be sent to Gulags, countless Jews to be sent to concentration camps, countless people from the DPRK to be killed because they disagreed with the "dear leader". In fact go back further in history and see how many lives spying cost throughout history.

The first problem is that you are attempting to claim foreign and domestic spying are the same. They are not the same, have never been the same. Domestic spying _always_ has nefarious purposes. We could argue similarly with foreign spying as well. How many people in DPRK has China spying caught? How many people in East Germany were caught by Russians?

JFK's famous line "the very word secrecy in a free and open society is repugnant" is spot on. It's not really hard to understand "why" if you look at the big picture.

The one arena that is is not contentious in is in the climatology community. Yes, there are a very small number of skeptics, but then again there are a small number of skeptics in the biology community who insist on some variant of Creationism (or Intelligent Design, as they like to market it these days). But all in all, the contention among scientists is over degree, and not over whether or not human-caused CO2 emissions are radically altering global climate.

Assuming it's the research and the software creation that costs the most, then once the software's created, it's no big deal.

Because industrialists and mining firms have never ever dumped toxic chemicals that ended up in drinking water before. No fucking sirreee, they're fucking angels and we should just let them do whatever the fuck they want,,, because MONEY!!!!

That is the skill of time management (or self-project management). These are the rules:

1) If you make the estimate yourself, then work hard to meet it. If someone else sets the estimate for you, then you have no obligation to meet it.
2) If someone asks you to do other work, then tell the owner of the original work that it will be late (or decline the other work).

Part of being professional is learning when to tell people 'no.' The solution to the problem is never "write bad code." If that is your answer, then you're wrong.

Well great. I wager I can produce really cheap toys by manufacturing out of substandard materials. Sure, the materials might be toxic, might even be highly flammable, but hey, all that fucking counts is profits! We should just let companies fuck everything and everyone up because MONEY!!!! We should let them lie and distort and attack anyone who questions because MONEY!!!! Fuck every single human being on earth, because MONEY!!!!